The Journeyman Chronicles: Part 4

Return from the Darkside

Those that follow closely will note that it has been some time since I have posted.  I could conveniently blame life for throwing too many distractions my way, but that would only be partly true.  Sometimes we find ourselves lost on the Darkside, alone in crowded rooms, alienated amongst family, and unable to understand why we can’t find our way.

I would love to say that that I have found my way back into the light again, but I have been fooled by it so many times.  What at first appears to be brilliant illumination, sadly resolves into just a mere shadow.  A cruel deceit, it fades, stranding me again in darkness, alone.  The Darkside does not play favorites, it is not kind, and does not care how hard you have tried.  It is stone, hard and unyielding, and it will not just give up because you have had enough

.

After a time, my wanderings lead me to another small, dim patch.  This time it is real, it is light.  A mere wisp of a flame to hold off the darkness, but it is there.  I cling to it, desperation feeds hope.  Is this the way out?  Tears stain my face, as I scramble across the midnight landscape, sharp edges tearing at my flesh.  The pain will not stop me this time, I will cross over.

And then I am there. Blue skies, sunlight, a fresh wind blowing in the trees, it is as I remember it.  Right now I am home.  I have been gone a long while, things have changed.  I don’t trust my memory; my time on the Darkside has made me question what is real, what is just a trick of the imagination.  It seems like this is the place; this is my house, this is my wife and these are my children.  I am home, I begin to weep; I let waves of emotion splash over me.  I am home, I am home…I can’t stop repeating it, but it is true.  I am home.  

It’s all Fun and Games until the Apocalypse Happens

First, let me assert that I am always on the side of reasonable preparation for those natural disasters that may occur from time to time.  I am all about being prepared for those eventualities, having the right tools and skill sets to be safe in the path of a natural disaster.  I have a first aid kit for home and car, I know how to perform CPR (which, as an aside, any parent of small children should know) and I have several other skills that would be useful in an emergency situation.  We even have a food stuffs put up for “just in case”, along with candles for the occasional power outages.  We are sensibly prepared for life in a tropical weather zone, where hurricanes are a possibility.  We have plans for escape ahead of a really bad storm, with rally points for friends and family at different locations.  We review these plans regularly, and we are sure that all of our measures are as well planned as possible.

Now I will concede the point that we could be more prepared.   I will go so far as to question whether we are adequately prepared for any and all eventualities, but in the end I believe that there is a fine line between reasonable preparation and what could only be described as a certain type of obsession.  If you are spending a fortune on survival rations, weapons, ammunition and other toys for TEOTWAWKI (The End of the World as We Know It), you probably find what I would consider reasonable woefully inadequate.  With the televising of the Doomsday prepping community, America is seeing the marketing of a perverse preoccupation with the end of all things.

Consider the following:  Let us assume that a prepper and his family has prepared for the inevitable collapse of civilization.  They have packed up their bug out bags, collected their ammo, fueled up their four wheel drive SUV, and relocated to their elaborately prepared bunker.  As they close their armored door to the chaos around them, they are firmly committed to surviving the final collapse.  Six months pass, the world as we know it devolves into the worst parts of “Mad Max”.  Our prepper hero and his family emerge from their bunker, triumphantly join hands, kneel in prayer, and…promptly become the kings and queens of the rubble pile that used to be civilization.  The world of fast food and the internet is gone, along with air conditioning, cell phones, electricity, modern sanitation and the other things that we have come to expect from 21^st century America.  Ahead lay poverty, deprivation, and misery the likes of which no one alive today, outside of the Horn of Africa or the Sudan, has ever experienced.  There will be no more Twinkies, Diet Coke, or Snickers; just misery, pain and a few very unfortunate survivors. 

So what then is the attraction of Prepping?  To be the king of the pile of debris that was once modern civilization?  Which begs another question: Like the man who knows he is going to die, and then finds a way to make it inevitably happen, are all these preppers actually contributing to an inevitable collapse just by the very fact that they are doing all these things?  Will prepping actually cause the collapse to happen?  By its very nature, “prepping” encourages a paranoid and obsessive nature from its adherents, which is not to say that these people are crazy or ill, but just slightly odder than nature would have intended, or that most feel comfortable with.

Now how does this create a collapse event? Let’s imagine that the prepper community begins to focus on one particular individual who is the acme of the movement.  He jerks meat with ease, hunts like a forest predator, can make a fire just by the reflection of his awesomeness alone.  He makes Bear Grylls look like a girly man, and has better facial hair than Grizzly Adams.  He is the ultimate survivor.  Drop him in the middle of nowhere with nothing more than a toothpick, a piece of gum and good intentions, and he can “MacGyver” civilization back into existence.  Let us also assume that this person has seized upon social media to educate his fellow preppers on the ways of survival.  He blogs, tweets, facebooks, and YouTube’s with the best of them; thousands of followers watch and read about his exploits as he prepares himself for the end of the world.

Now let us take this one step further, and imagine that one day a tweet goes out; “Run for the hills! This is it!” A video goes up on his channel, just showing nothing but “Run for the hills, the time is now! Be safe.” Over and over, images of chaos and collapse followed by that message and he suddenly stops updating his blog, no further tweets come from him.  He just drops off the air.

A portion of his group, laugh derisively, thinking that their “leader” has finally blown a brain fuse and gone off the deep end, and decide that they will stop following.  Most of his audience, take a quick pause, look at the chats, the news, and not seeing the world being consumed in a fiery flood, go back about their daily business.   Another, smaller, more intense group however, they see this as a signal to grab their bug-out-bags, ammo, food, and families and head for the back of beyond as fast as their SUV’s will take them.

They don’t look back, they don’t stop to analyze, and they don’t have debates or discussions.  They bolt. A screeching of tires in the middle of the night and they are gone.  Now their neighbors who have been watching  with a perverse glee as “Apocalypse Boy” and his family go through their “preparations”, notice that they are gone, and in a hurry at that.  Then they start asking, “Why? What did they know that we don’t? “; Before long emails, tweets and text erupt across the infosphere, all indicating that some dire event has or will shortly occur.

 

Now let’s go one step further.  Let us assume that a series of small events happens.  An earthquake, a tornado or even just a local power outage; events that are totally unconnected, occur.  Or worse yet, some nefarious group of malefactors decide to seize on the growing sense of chaos and push the whole thing over the edge.  Maybe they are jihadists, anarchists or maybe they are just doing it for the lulz, but whatever their motivation, they decide that they will throw a few gallons of highly flammable liquid on an already smoldering fire, just to see what happens.  All that is needed is the right tipping point, and the whole Jenga game that is our society topples over into madness.

Suddenly what has been the preoccupation of a group of outliers and extremist “wackadoo’s” is now being acted out on live television.  With 24/7/365 news coverage so tightly coupled to the tweets and posts of the hoards of the infosphere, what might have just been idle rumor mongering and gossip is now considered “fair and balanced”.  All our malefactors of cyberspace have to do is hack a few twitter accounts, post a few videos, and a paranoid and distrustful society erupts.  You don’t think it can happen?   Ask Tunisia, Libya and Egypt.  Nations who for decades had endured hard line oppressive dictatorship, saw their governments evaporate in a paroxysm of civil war, all manipulated by an initial upwelling  from the internet.

So what happens next in our scenario?  Well, imagine the worst parts of the post-Katrina aftermath erupting in every major metropolitan area in the United States.  In a nation where people will raid the shelves of the local grocery store bare on just the whim of inclement weather, it is not too hard to imagine what that same nation now full of fearful and paranoid people will do.  Looting, rioting, and chaos; then as the government merely tries to restore order, any force will be interpreted as a “crack down” by an intolerant “regime”.  The usual finger pointing will ensue with the Left and the Right trying to blame the other for the “excessive force”.   As the government becomes more and more paralyzed by “systemic inertia” people will start taking things into their own hands, and what was just a minor “molehill” event has now spiraled into a “mountain” of a disaster.

 

None of this actually is the result of anything.  Lies, rumors, misinformation and bad science have positioned us to react from a place of pure emotion.  We have surrendered our reason to paranoia, and our intellect to passion.  We all know that there is something wrong, but we can’t put our fingers on it, but all it will take is just a push.  Maybe at most a few, and like a cheap rubber band, we snap.  Sudden collapse, due to nothing but an inclination toward that result, fostered by a culture of paranoia, brought on by nothing more than an illusion, triggered by our “fight or flight” instinct.

Now I submit all of this to you, mostly with tongue placed firmly in cheek, but you would have to admit that there is more than mere supposition at work here.  Are preppers really bat-guano crazies, hoarding for the Apocalypse?  Some, who have taken it to the extreme, could certainly be considered as such.  Most are just folks who know a little bit of precaution, prevents a lot of misery.  But in a world where we seem more and more to have surrendered our reason to the lowest common denominator, can we ever be sure that we aren’t being manipulated into a situation where we are poised on such a fine edge, that we fall over into the abyss with nothing more than a light push.

Homeworld

Carl Sagan, as part of the Voyager project, turned the cameras back on Earth, and captured a pale blue dot, the size of a pixel, in the darkness.  “That is here”, he said.  “That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you have ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.  The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar’, every ‘supreme leader’, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there- on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam ”

This is your home.  This is the sum total of all you know.  This is the totality of all your parents, grandparents and so on; all the way back to your knuckle-dragging, fur-clad, ancestors.  This is the abode of life as we know it.  And though there are millions of other worlds that might be like it in our universe, this is the only one like this one that we know for sure has intelligent life.

When you stand upon the highest elevation and look around, all that lies beneath your gaze, that vast distance to the horizon is just a small portion of the immensity that is Earth.  And as large as our homeworld is, it is such a small place when compared to the mind numbing expanse of the Cosmos.  It is all so very big, and we are such small and fragile things.

We are small fragile things connected to each other by our existence on this planet.  This planet is not just an American planet, nor is it commanded by any other group.  It is all of ours.  Not just one group’s home; but all humans, all life, cling to our world as a newborn to its mother’s teat.  This world shelters us, feeds us, not just the nourishment from our agriculture, but it feeds our very souls.  It is as much a part of us as we are of it.  In the distant future, when humans from Earth go out to that stars, their symbol won’t be a flag of any nation, but the image of our blue-green, teraqueous globe, against a black field.

What that image will show, is that we are one species.  That we have out grown our tribal hates, our juvenile bigotry, and blinding superstitions.  We will walk together into the future, and across our world.  It will, by necessity, be a world without divisions.  It will be united, by our common humanity, not by force of arms.  It will be a mature society, having thrown off the emotional tantrums of adolescence.  I will not live to see it.  In point of fact, none of us will.  Generations yet unborn will live and die before we get there, but get there we will.  

The Journeyman Chronicles: Part 3

The Unmentionable Darkness Along the Way

The path has never been vaguer; it is nearly indistinguishable from the surrounding terrain.  There is no definition, just mere hints, fading away into the impenetrable darkness.  Ruins of what was, what might have been are strewn about, decaying in the foul mist.  I stumble about in the dim murk, lost.

I miss the light, the warmth of the Summerlands, where all was carefree.  We were young then, and troubles seemed so very far away.  I was happy, bathed in the light of the noon day sun, with a gentle breeze, and the crystalline sounds of chimes in the distance.  It was so simple, to run, play and be free in that gentle world.  Pain was a scraped knee or a childish crush unrequited.  It drifted away as quickly as it came.  But summer does not last forever.

Now I cross a dark, ruined land.  No map, nor lamp to guide my way, I try to move forward.  I fall, I get up, and I fall again.  I am bloodied, bruised; the pain is a fire, blinding me. Why am I here, where is the light, where are the gentle breezes?  Why have I lost my way so profoundly?  I thought I knew all the answers.  I knew the size and the shape of the world, I had everything calculated when the journey began.  How foolish I was to even try to go this far, how juvenile that I thought I could find my way. I want to lay down my burdens, and just stop blundering about in the pitch black darkness of this never ending night.

Hamlet’s lament comes to mind, and I wonder if just surrendering to the darkness is the end to all of this.  The bogeymen, just beyond my reach, murmur in the ebon dark.  They speak in wretched voices, saying things dark and malicious.  Their venomous tirades try to pull me into those places that I do not want to tread.  I don’t want to go down this road anymore.  I don’t want to be here anymore, I refuse to give in today.  Tomorrow may be different, but today, now, I keep feeling my way, looking forward to the light, continuing my journey to the west.  I will welcome dawn, when it comes.  The bogeymen will turn into piles of clothes on the backs of chairs, their words mere echoes in the unmentionable darkness along the way.

The Year of the Dragon

In Chinese mythology the dragon is the most auspicious of all astrological signs.  It brings with it the manifestation of masculine energy, the embodiment of the yang.  The five toed dragon rules all as the representative of the Mandate of Heaven, the imperial symbol.  Its curled form bringing a natural power, dynamic changes and a purposeful ferocity; it alters the world, submitting it to the order of the Universe, a higher order than that imposed by any man.

The dragon speaks to our most ancient fears.  It crawls through the most primitive parts of our brain, where the simple hairless ape tries to make sense of a reptilian predator.  It was a vicious, cold-blooded bringer of death, a scaled killer of innocents and an arbiter of final dispositions.  It has haunted our nightmares, and also invaded our dreams.  It inspires our imaginations, giving wings and flight to our fantasies.

In this year, we will see change.  Change is the essence of all things.  In a universe that does not acknowledge our presence, it merely signals the next phase of our existence.  We move from order to chaos, to a new order.  Entropy expands and we are along for the ride.  Politics, the Economy, the world at large is coming apart, or so it seems.  But what if there is a higher order in our chaos?  What if we lack the perspective to see the good, when all around us are manifestations of evil?

What if, as the Doomsday Clock moves towards midnight, we have our finest hour?  What happens when we achieve our highest aspirations, our greatest clarity, in the midst of societal self immolation?  When faced with such destruction, can we be the people that we have always aspired to be?

As the dragon makes its inevitable way across the night’s sky, do we rise to the occasion, inspired by its strength, steeled with the knowledge that by standing in the face of the fire, we will overcome all obstacles.   Or do we bow to the inevitable, that bad men motivated by lust and greed will enforce the tyranny of the strong over the will of the just.  The hour is not too late, but the clock is ticking.  The dragon, the world and our fellow humans await our answer.

The Journeyman Chronicles: Part 2

With No Way as Way

                There is a brief moment when you realize that the universe and everything else that you take for granted, isn’t exactly what you thought it was.  You are instantly overcome by circumstances so out of your control that you question the very nature of reality itself.  Up is in fact down, left is now right, black is white, and things that made sense just a few moments ago, now seem all too “Lewis Carol”.  You have fallen down the rabbit hole, and reality is not that comfy cozy thing that you have become accustomed to.

                That brief span of time is known as an “oh-no” second, as in “Oh no! I just sent that personal email to all!”  Chaos is more than a collapse toward entropy; it is a twisting, yawing mindbender of an event that smashes our ordered, mundane world like a giddy toddler knocking down building block towers.  With all the subtly of a gloriously demented game of Jenga, our lives can suddenly collapse from order into a frightening freefall of epic fail.  In the blink of an eye, we are spun about on the wheel of fate, only to find ourselves succumbing to the vagaries of chance.

                In the past I would cry and bemoan my circumstances. Now, I am beginning to find acceptance of the uncontrollable nature of life in the 21^st century.  I am learning that there is no way, there is no path.  The route ahead is unexplored and hazardous, full of dreadful missteps and wondrous adventures.  Yes, there be dragons and dangerous shoals ahead, but they are not showstoppers, just merely obstacles to be avoided, worked around.

                I only know that my time is finite and my destination lies far to the west, beyond the setting sun.  With the clock ticking, I set out once more. My course is uncertain; will it lead me to the solution, or another dead end?  Who can say; I only know that my path is built one stone at a time.  I carve it out between sunrise and sunset, step by step, fighting chaos, clinging to order, hoping, dreaming, laughing, loving, one day…one moment at a time.

It’s All Political Theater; or Why I Don’t Care about Election 2012

Last night, the people of Iowa spoke.  They spoke about a nation whose leaders are not in touch with its citizens.  They spoke about people who are out of work, or underemployed.  They spoke about their religious convictions, and how their faith influences their conduct.  They spoke about a freer nation, a “shinning city on the hill”, a beacon for the entire world to see.  They spoke about a place where a man can rise from the most humble beginnings and achieve whatever levels of greatness and wealth that he can apply himself to obtain through the sweat of his own brow.  They talked about family values and tradition.  They talked about making the right types of change, not just slogans, but finding the true and descent America that we all know exists.  Unfortunately, no one listened.

Our political process has descended to the point where our elections have become just another act on the grand stage of American Politics, where we get a lot of sizzle, but very little steak.  We have gone from the indispensable man, to the interchangeable one.  Left or Right, it no longer matters who is residing at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, because that person is no longer running the show. If they ever were, they definitely aren’t now.  I suppose that I could make the usual screed against the special interests, but the fact is that the people who really run this country aren’t even visible to the average person.  Our country has been surrendered to the professional politicians, career bureaucrats, mass media manipulators and plutocrats who feed our addictions with 24/7/365 drivel carelessly spread across 500 channels.

The people who should run this country aren’t the political class; they certainly shouldn’t be the media. They should be the people that we see in the mirror every day.  Without us, the government can’t govern.  The government cannot run without the consent of the governed.  When enough people decide that they “aim to misbehave”, then governments get scared.  Ask Muhamar Quaddafi if he was afraid of his people.  You might find the conversation a trifle one sided, as he was pulled out of a drainage ditch and shot in the head by angry partisans, who mere months before had been fearful of his wrath.

The sad fact is that going from hard left to hard right, only results in a tank slapping nightmare, where the corrections get more and more fierce until finally we lose control and slam into the inevitable pavement of history.  Our nation is facing the greatest challenge in its history.  Whether the people will surrender their freedom for what basically amounts to government cheese, or do we finally throw off the shackles of societal engineering, and learn how to go our own way.

The government does not belong in our schools, homes, houses of worship, and not our businesses.  It should not determine who marries whom, nor what happens in a woman’s body.  As my favorite brown coated starship captain is fond of saying, “I just want to go my own way.” I want to be able to walk my path, to create a place in the world for me and mine, and not to be bothered with those who insist upon foisting their “agenda” upon a simple man.

In the end, this election is not about winners and losers, neither left nor right. It will really be about the perpetuation of a system by which the common man is disenfranchised, marginalized and finally, reduced to little more than a pawn, a pathetic piece moved at the whim of faceless masters, whose mediocre machinations belie their limited intellect and dearth of vision.  Our loyalty and freedom sold for the simplistic comforts of social justice, and the pale, impotent light of compact fluorescent bulbs. 

The Journeyman Chronicles: Part 1

The Voyage of Life: Manhood by Thomas Cole

{Note: The Journeyman Chronicles are going to be a continuing feature.  A journeyman is the stage between an apprentice and a master.  It is where one has learned their craft, and begins to practice it unsupervised.  It can also define one who is on a journey. It this last definition that applies to the Journeyman Chronicles, I am on a journey.  From sickness to health, from darkness to light, from weakness to strength, I am on a journey of discovery.}

                The problem with being an adult is that there is no path.  There is no way, but the one that you make.  That path is never clear, it is undefined and tenuous.  We can only illuminate the briefest area in front of our feet.  We often stumble, unsure of our next steps.   We are blind to the future, subject to the whims of causality; we live in seconds, minutes, hours, days, months and years.  We can’t know tomorrow, because we cannot see over the horizon of now.

                Our life’s journey is one that we cannot plot out.  And if we could, it would be subject to the whims of our interactions with the rest of the universe.  We live in the ever collapsing wave function of now, each interaction building onto our subjective reality.  Today, now, is all we are guaranteed; our now is built upon our immediate reality.  Like the mall diagram, we are here, under the red spot of today.

                It is as if we are in a boat on a rapidly flowing river, we have no control over the direction and flow, we desperately cling to our reality, not knowing what turns, rapids and dangers lie ahead.  We endure the whims of the universe, we use faith to give us strength, we use reason to derive understanding, and we use invention to refine our experience.  Time’s river takes toward an unknown point on the far horizon to the west, whether we want to or not.

                

November 17th 2011

  It’s late and I’m tired. I cannot be sure how much of this is stream of consciousness, or just the rattling around of things in my head.  Jumbled and distorted by the medications that have brought me back from the dead.  No one could accuse me of thinking straight these days.  And I cannot be sure how much is real.

I spend the day with a tube plumbed into my arm, attached to a pump, the pump attached to a plastic jellyfish looking thing filed with the latest results of medical science. I am nauseous, tired and sweaty.  But I try to sit comfortably in an overstuffed recliner, like the other patients, each attached to their own intravenous “jellyfish”, sitting in our own alcoves, in various states of numbness.  It is like some bizarre party where everyone is high, but no one is enjoying themselves.  It is quiet except for the beeping of pump alarms as the “jellyfish” run dry and the hum of the air conditioner.  Occasionally, someone shambles by, dragging their “pet”, and they make their way to relieve themselves, our eyes meet briefly, and we understand each other.

  There is a lot of false bravado here.  NFL locker rooms have nothing on this.  The sick and dying cling to life, miserable as it is, by trying to smile their way through it.  They joke about their hair falling out, the nausea, the vomiting and the jaundice.  A gallows humor fills the place, because if you can’t laugh at this situation, sitting here using poison to kill parts of yourself that are killing other parts, what can you laugh at.

  My jellyfish is finally drained of its essential bodily fluids, and the fastidiously neat Jamaican nurse unplugs its long plastic tendril form my body.  I sit, freed at last, and almost too tired to get up.  I heave myself on to my feet, fight the sudden wave of nausea, and breathe in and out. My head clears. I begin the long walk out.

  I see an older woman, who I swore had blonde hair when I came in, now bald.  Her skin is the color of old parchment, jaundiced and covered in bruises.  The left side of her face is slack.  I don’t know what she’s got, but she has a slew of jellyfish on her pole.  She looks like she has been through all kinds of hell, I could only guess at what her diagnosis is and what her prognosis is going to be.  I give her that wink and whiplash smile that’s worked on every girl since I was sixteen.  “Take it easy love.” I say in a jaunty tone.  She smiles, wanly.

 

  There is a young woman in her late teens or very early twenties; she would be pretty if she wasn’t almost grey.  She’s reading that book about glittery vampires.  Suddenly, I can see her ultimate fantasy.  She would give anything to be a glittery vampire too.  She would give anything, not to be here, not to be sick, not to be plugged into this infernal damned beeping jellyfish, slowly poisoning her, so that she can live.  She wants to be pretty again, go to parties, to live…even if it means being a glittering vampire.

 I meander through the labyrinthine hallways, finally reaching the outside world.  It is balmy and wet.  The air is thick, humid, it smells like life.  It smells of civilization, and green living things.  It is good.  I suck it in. Finally I collapse in the driver’s seat of my car.  My head is vibrating; it feels like it will shake apart.  The meds are kicking out.  I drive home, carefully.  My arms are so scared with needle marks that any cop that pulls me over will think that I am a junkie for sure.

  I collapse, finally in my bed.  My wife and children rumble around me like tornadoes, each a swirling mass of chaos that I, in my fatigue, am almost oblivious to.  Later I awake, and write this. Not a dream, not a nightmare, some place where faces and time are distorted, memory is warped and reality becomes relative. 

Chaos, Complexity, Uncertainty and Expert Systems

Chaos:  a mathematical theory where small differences in initial conditions (such as those due to rounding errors in numerical computation) yield widely diverging outcomes for chaotic systems, rendering long-term prediction impossible in general.

Complexity: a condition of numerous elements in a system and numerous forms of relationships among the elements.

Uncertainty: A principle from quantum mechanics which states a fundamental limit on the accuracy with which certain pairs of physical properties of a particle, such as position and momentum, cannot be simultaneously known. In other words, the more precisely one property is measured, the less precisely the other can be controlled, determined, or known.

Expert System: a computer system that emulates the decision-making ability of a human expert. Expert systems are designed to solve complex problems by reasoning about knowledge, like an expert, and not by following the preprogrammed instructions of program code.

Question: Could our systems have evolved to the point where they are so complex, that they are beyond our control?

When you watch the pundits and experts pontificate about the economy, or geopolitics, do you ever feel that they seem to just appear to be bloviating about things that they really have no grip on?  In a game where there are 7 billion participants, can we ever guarantee an equality of outcomes?  Given so many variables and the ever more complex interactions with each other, can we truly be in control?

When we look at our world, we see so many closely coupled interactions that it may in point of fact, now be beyond the control of humanity to balance our supply chain, financial markets, and resources.  Consider how food in distributed throughout Africa.  If equality of outcome were possible, would there be millions of people starving to death.  If we could establish long term control, reducing the chaotic pressures of our current world state to small perturbations over time, instead of wild, bubble induced swings, would that not be better for our species in the long run?  Efficient, pragmatic, and science based solutions to energy, resource distribution and population governance may be the next stage of societal evolution.

 

I have suggested in the past, that in a world with plenty, where scarcity of food, or other resources, is a thing of the past, our conflicts may disappear. If you have all your needs met, and your wants are accessible, what do you complain about?  Do you still have wars over ideologies, when there are no oppressed?  When everyone is comfortable, do radical ideologies have anywhere to get a foothold?

If expert systems were available to distribute the least amount of negative outcomes across the widest population possible, would that actually work?  Note, I said, least amount of negative outcomes.  We cannot insure that everyone will always have the most awesome day ever, everyday.  But we can say that the least amount of “suck” will be distributed across the widest possible base, thus reducing the overall amount of negative outcomes.

Would such a system reduce the apparent Chaos currently affecting our world today?  In a post scarcity world, where computer systems increase human efficiency to the point that no one goes without, could we move from childhood to our more mature state?  I am not asking for a world where puppies and grandmas never die, and we live forever; such fantasies are unproductive flights of childish imagination.  I am looking for world where needless suffering and cruelty has been removed, and that we, as a species, can unite, toward loftier goals than internecine, tribal warfare; mindless, soul numbing entertainments and the other petty distractions that we have come to expect from 21^st century humanity. 

Somnium 2

I surrender myself to the inevitable darkness of sleep, which in turn throws me into this night’s maelstrom.  How far down the rabbit hole of crazy will I allow myself to go tonight?  Bing…last floor, totally bizarre with drabs of paranoid.  Enjoy your stay, and please watch your step.

Things are out of sequence here, the glass is broken and then it is full, people move in reverse and reality is truly relative.  Like a poorly edited movie, I jump from scene to scene and none of it makes any sense.   There is nothing to which I can grasp on to, and I slide down into the warm embrace of madness.

The red, stained darkness of my mind reels at the disjointed assemblage of images running riot through the outer reaches of my skull.  Come on you demons, if you think you are hard enough. Let’s have at it then shall we.  Let’s play this night’s mad adventure out for real now.  Let us fight our apocalypse here, on this bare ground.  You, me, and all the chaotic self-destruction that we can muster; the party is at ground zero, and I brought the dip.

None of this is making any sense, but it no longer frightens me.  I am reveling in the chaos; bring it, I scream, and a demon’s head explodes in gory triumph.  Point blank, both barrels, screaming now.  Fix bayonets, and charge to the sound of the guns.  This is the revolution and it will not be televised.  Come on you demons and devils of the Id, let’s get this over with. 

A mirror shatters, and then reforms.  The glass was jagged, now it is smooth.  Smooth, flat, brilliant in the light.  Where is that light coming from? The glass is below the fight, which is falling upward, away from me.  Flat, featureless, dazzling …I’m falling faster, I can’t fly, but I am falling with style.  The glassy surface yields and I find myself in another space.

Brilliant and crystalline, it hums with a glorious pulse.  Everything moves; the subtle eddies of space-time are revealed, and order is resurrected. The crystal gives way to clockwork, gears slowly moving, time flowing as it should.  I open the door, onto an improbable beach.  Carl and Albert are sitting under a thick, sweet smelling cloud.  Their chaise lounges are parked next to a palm; their drinks are fuchsia with little yellow umbrellas.  The universe has had its way with me.  They raise their drinks and smile.

 

The alarm goes off.

Betrayal

Writers are an emotional lot.  They are sometimes oversensitive to the various in’s and out’s of human interaction.  What is just a minor spat to someone else becomes a lurid, overarching drama ending in tragedy.  What we often see on some of our more intellectually challenged television productions are just that, the poorly manufactured mountain out of a rather pathetic molehill.  Then there are those dramas that we act out in our daily existence.  These events occur in the darkness and obscurity of our private lives, hidden from the eyes of strangers and family alike, we suffer in silence.  It is my firm belief that there are two types of people in life, victims and survivors.  The victim picks at the scab of tragedy, relishing in the pain.  The survivor adapts, overcomes and allows even the deepest wounds to scar over, to mend and heal with time.  Some wounds however, run deep.  They terrify the soul, and burn our conscience.

Betrayal is that deep wound.  I am speaking not of something as prurient as the betrayal of a lover, or a friend, but of something much deeper; when our body fails us, that is the most devastating betrayal of all.  We all understand our mortality, we see those around us age, become frail and fade into memory.  We except the inevitable direction of time’s arrow, and we cling to each day, sucking the marrow out of each moment.  We are blissfully ignorant of our deaths. Then we stumble, our body fails us.  For the first time we realize our mortality, we see what has been invisible to this point.  The clock of our lives is finite; seconds, minutes, hours, days and years are ticking by ever faster.  There is no reset, and zero hour is coming up fast.

I never knew fear until my body failed me.  I was never afraid of the long dark nights.  I slept well.  I went about my daily tasks, not caring about my portion of life.  I lived.  Right up until I started to die.  My body was at war with itself.  As the battles raged, I found myself in a hospital bed, facing the inevitable; with no other choice, I jumped. With zero options, surgery was the only way out.  The medications were administered, I was anesthetized, and the doctors operated. I remember waking, being relieved that the journey to the west had not ended.  I would see another dawn.

My memories are foggy about that time.  They are distorted by the pain medication, and even the pain itself.  Nightmares still haunt me, even a year later.  Fear, confusion, doubt hound me.  There are days where I am paralyzed by weakness.  Sleepless nights, frustrated days, and the constant pain of rehabilitation, I am still hurt by this betrayal of the flesh.  I am stunned by my mortality. The physical scars have healed, but they still transect my body and are visible.  They are the first thing that I see when I use the bathroom mirror.  Some days, they don’t take my breath away.  Other days, I am still shocked by them, an eternal reminder of the time my body betrayed me.

Hold Fast

One of my favorite movies is the often maligned “Master and Commander: The Far Side of The World”.  I think it is about the most accurate depiction of life at sea on board a Royal Navy Frigate during the Napoleonic Wars as can be produced.  In one of the scenes is an old Jack Tar who has seen many years before the mast.  Wizened and carved by the elements, this old salt has tattooed across his hands the words, “Hold Fast”.  In his age, he had to, just to survive. He held fast to the rigging, else he would have fallen to his death many a time.  He had seen the roughest life could be, and yet he was still ticking along.

So, why the reference; have you been watching the news lately?  Our nation is before the mast; we are facing the highest winds, the most frightening waves, we are storm tossed, rudderless.  The helm of state is hard over all the way, but we cannot turn.  Like the Titanic, we face nothing short of icy Armageddon.  This is not about politics. I am not being political. The facts present themselves, I am merely interpreting them.

If you except my interpretation, then as chaos erupts about us, what should you do? As the old Jack Tar said, you hold fast.  You hold fast to those truths that are irrefutable, you hold fast to those things which will lift you up, you hold fast to those people who will stand with you.  If you are a person of faith, hold fast to that.  If you are a skeptic, hold fast to that.  Pragmatism, honest questioning, fair play, the essentials of human decency are our rigging, and we are going to hold fast to them.

Nations will rise and fall, the sea of history is one of conflict and turmoil, with brief moments of glacial calm.  As the ship that is our nation is tossed about in the storms of economic chaos, we must hold fast.  We must hold fast to our freedom, we must hold fast to justice, we must hold fast to our reason.  When we are beset by storms, and the inexplicable events of life, it is our reason, the sapient part of our humanity, which must prevail.  It is too easy to just surrender to the insanity, too simple to let go and stop fighting.  The hardest thing to do is to hold fast.

Yes, our muscles ache. Yes, our calloused hands are bleeding.  Yes, we are tired.  But if we let go we will die.  We will die as sure as if we had fallen from the rigging.  Freedom and prosperity are not easy, they are hard won.  They require focus and management, they need tending.  Our moral imperative is to maintain what was given to us for the next generation, so they can bring it forward to the next. This is the way of things.

So what do you do when the rain falls from the sky, the seas rise from their depths, and the very pillars of heaven shake?  As the man says, “You’d better hold fast.”

Screaming at the wind

If you scream and no one is listening, did you actually scream at all?  There are times when it is all I can do just not to completely surrender to the chaos, the swirling effervescent madness that is all around us.  In a crowded room of people talking about the trivia of the day, it is all I can do to contain my fury.  Is this the best that we can come up with?

Thousands of years of progress have led us to what?  A pre-processed, self absorbed society obsessed with celebrity, the sexualizing of our children, sublimating creativity, perverting passion, and dismissing reason, because it is inconvenient to be educated and think.  It is much better to be a passive consumer, don’t make waves, don’t create, and don’t yearn to be free.

Free is hard, it is complicated, it requires knowledge and skill.  You can’t sit and watch hundreds of hours of television and be free.  You can’t have a world of pundits and policy wonks tell you about how things should be if you are free.  If you are free you can think for yourself, you can apply reason and skepticism, you can derive first principles through understanding and observation.  You can make things if you are free, and the things that you make will be useful and have a certain raw beauty because you made them. 

If you are free, than you can be heard, because your voice is your own.  It is drawn out of you, compelled not by “animal spirits” but by the very fact that you are free.  You choose to sing, laugh, shout and cry, because you are free.  You can go about your life, as you see fit.  Living in harmony, knowing that you are free, freedom is hopeful.  Because you are free, you can step aside from the petty prejudices and tribal hatreds that have bound us to outmoded superstitions.

I yearn for this type of freedom.  I am tired of being afraid; I am tired of looking down.  I am tired of being told, “This is for your own good.” I am tired of the mendacity and mediocrity; I am tired of being ignored.  I am tired of being taken for granted; I AM TIRED OF NOT BEING LISTENED TO!  They hear me well enough, but they don’t listen.  Listening requires intellectual effort, and thought.  I am just background noise, like an overloud radio or television, they just mute me.

I am screaming, in the wind.  I can feel the rawness in my throat; my eyes are tearing with the effort.  I am jumping, shouting, yelling, cursing but to no avail.  The wind steals my voice, and I am just another mad man, yelling silently in the gloaming.  There is nothing to see here folks, move along.

235 years anon

July 4, 1776, a group of men, sweltering in the heat of Philadelphia in the summer, complete a document.  It is unlike any other document ever written.  It separates what hitherto have been colonies from their colonizer; it creates a nation from nothing but a tax revolt and an idea.  The idea is one so profound that it’s still reverberating into our time.  Can humans govern themselves, justly and rationally?

These men wrote down, for the first time the founding ideals of what they would base their government on.  They made the astounding revelation that all men are created equal, and that they are entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  A few years later, they crafted a Constitution, which enumerated the powers of the government, describing in detail exactly what the limits were for those who would run our country.  We are the first nation to do so, to set down in black and white what we believe and how we should conduct our governance.

In 1861 we fought a war to define just what a man was, and what the word “American” means.  Today we understand that men, is a noun that constitutes all members of the species Homo sapiens; that it does not discriminate by color, creed, or sex.  If you are a human, you should be free and allowed to pursue your life’s course as you will.  Since then we have lit the world with the light from the shining city on the hill, always trying to free the oppressed.

Are we a perfect nation? No.  Sadly, we are a nation of humans, with the frailty associated with that state.  Our sins have been spread across the world, for all to see.  Our reach has exceeded our grasp, but our heart is in the right place.  We don’t occupy, we liberate.  We build schools, not walls.  We bring water, power, and light to those places where there isn’t any.  We sacrifice our dearest blood and costliest treasure to ensure the freedom of humanity.

And so the sun rises on the 236^th year of our republic, we have many accomplishments under our belt, but the road ahead leads through some dark times.  Our nation, leveraged to the hilt, must find a way toward the promise of tomorrow.  We need to make sure that the work of our Founders continues, that we live up to their aspirations, the dedication and sacrifices of generations past, and the responsibility of the us here in the present.  We must ensure that ours is not the generation that squanders the gifts of freedom, so that our children can enjoy them in the future, and to that end defend our republic and the ideals which it was founded upon.  So, the revolution continues, each generation entrusted to carry the flame, one step further down the path, lighting the way to tomorrow.

Romance in the Time of Riots

                                     This image was sourced from Getty Images Worldwide.

There are few constants in the human drama, but amongst them is the need for comfort and solace in the time of great confusion and chaos.  When the world is falling down around us, we seek solace in the embrace of our loved ones.  It is our essential need to be wanted or loved.  Whether it is the unconditional furry love of a dog, or the embrace of a lover, we need that contact that tells us we are not alone.

So much of our lives are spent in dizzying pursuits.  We chase our careers and the almighty dollar, often to the neglect of ourselves and those that we love.  Love is a funny thing though.  If you ask someone why they do what they do, it is for “love”.  “I want my___ to have whatever they want or need.”  We show our affection in the form of an almost obsessive compulsion to acquire wealth, position, status.  In the end it is our pursuits that overwhelm us, and we lose ourselves in the mundane trivia of the day-to-day.

And then, chaos erupts.  Disease strikes or a natural disaster destroys, and we find ourselves looking at our “stuff”.  How many people have lost their homes, in the tornadoes that have swept America, only to find that what they were most grateful for was the safety of a child, parent, or family member; People wept openly when a pet emerged from the rubble of what had been their home.  They combed the wreckage of their town, searching for those that are lost.

This is our humanity in the raw.  The distilled essence of what we should be.  Our capacity for great good and decency spills out.  We are our truest selves in the midst of a crisis.  When we stand against all odds that is when we shine as a species.  People coming to help, not even knowing what to do, but coming across great distances, because they know that they must help these people.

Love is the power of the human mind to reach outside itself, and consider the needs of someone else above our own.  It isn’t the eroticism gawked at society, made prurient and criminal by religion, but the higher notion of being more than just an island alone, against an uncaring and unfeeling universe.  Love is the peculiar binder of two souls in the dark and vast cosmos.

Which leads to us to the image above; as absolute chaos erupts, two human beings find each other. They embrace, holding onto one another as their civilization is being torn apart. In a moment of noise and tumult, confusion verging on anarchy, they kiss.  In that kiss, they ignore all the destruction going on around them, and for a brief moment, become a universe unto themselves.  They ignore the riot police, truncheons drawn; they ignore the rioters, looting and burning; they ignore the hardness of the pavement, they ignore everything but each other.  They are in the moment.

Later there will be discussions of how and why.  Discussions of “Where is our car?” or “Did you see that cop smack that kid?”  What they will always remember, is that kiss, that fundamental expression of our humanity, in the middle of a riot.

The Old Man and the Sea of Tranquility

All I can hear is my breathing…a regular in and out, echoing inside my helmet.  I’m just trying to be in the moment, breathing to relax.  Here I am, in a closet sized room, waiting to go someplace I have been wanting to go my whole life.

As a child, my family would watch the Apollo moon landing footage on our super 8 projector.  I must have made my dad rewind that film a million times.  The shadowy footage of Armstrong stepping out into the blinding sun of Mare Tranquilitatis is burned into my childhood memory lie some sort of surreal afterimage.  How many models of the Lunar Module did I build?  The space shuttle?  My life has been spent looking up at the stars through telescopes and the cockpits of planes. 

How many times did I study the lunar surface from afar, dreaming of stepping out into its magnificent desolation?  I have sacrificed so much to get here.  Time and money sure, but also family and relationships; this is a one way trip.  There is no going back.

But I’m okay with that.  Most people are consigned to a hole in the ground, or a discarded urn on someone’s shelf. I’m here, now…as alive as I have ever been.  There is a voice in my headset, “Ten seconds to vacuum, confirm seals shut and locked.”  My suit is pressurized. It is so much lighter than when I tried it on Earth side.  The green light goes red.  The hatch unlocks.

I slide the gold visor down, my heart is racing now.  The hatch dilates, and suddenly I am awash in raw sunlight.  Brighter than the brightest day, I stumble out of the modest confines of my ship.  More like a balloon inside a tinker toy frame, with rockets bolted on, it was designed to bring me here.  Another larger balloon was sent up months ago, now buried under several feet of lunar regolith (dirt to most folks) it will be my last home in this life.

I’m not really thinking about that now.  I am alive, for the time being, and I will enjoy my time here.  For a man well into his 70’s in lunar gravity I’m quite spry.  I bounce out across the surface; in one sixth earth gravity, I can really move.  The old boy still has it. Hoddy Toddy, and away we go.

I am bounding across the surface, nothing I have ever done before has felt this good.  The arthritis is still there, but it doesn’t matter.  I move with a song in my heart and a spring in my step.   I have a mile to go to the shelter, but I am making good time.  I am moving like I did when I was a kid, I’m not even winded.

I’m having so much fun, that I begin to forget where I am.  I slow down and come to a stop, just shy of a small rise.  I turn around, hopping in place.  I see my ship, sitting in the distance.  It glistens like a gold wrapped candy in the sunlight.  It was my way here, and she’ll sit in the sun now forever, her job done.  Rest in Peace baby, and thank you.

I turn back toward the “base”…that’s a formal term; it’s more like a double wide, more like “rednecks in space”.  But it’ll be home.  I look up.  The Earth, rising above the horizon.  That was home; everything and everyone I have ever known and heard of is back there.  That blue and white orb is the representation of all of humanity.  Our cradle, our home, our trap - if we don’t get going.  It’s beautiful.  Standing in the stunning sunlight of lunar day, looking back at all that I have left behind, I consider the future, and my new home.

The Stars, at Night

“When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return.” -- Leonardo da Vinci

“I believe that we have come this far by the skin of our teeth, that we always make it just by the skin of our teeth — but that we will always make it … survive … endure. I believe that this hairless embryo with the aching, oversize brain case and the opposable thumb, this animal barely up from the apes, will endure — will endure longer than his home planet, will spread out to the other planets, to the stars, and beyond, carrying with him his honesty, his insatiable curiosity, his unlimited courage — and his noble essential decency.  This I believe with all my heart.” – Robert A. Heinlein

When was the last time that you looked up into the night’s sky?  When was the last time that you contemplated the wonder of the stars?  How many people have stopped looking up into the night?  In many of our cities, the light pollution is so bad that even if we were so inclined, the stars are obscured from our view.  Our inspiration for centuries of progress, lost in the pollution of our civilization.

In many arguments about going to the stars, many point out to the various injustices and crises here at home, saying that these should be our first duty.  The stars can wait, they say, first we need to clean up our home.  They point to the costs, saying the vast sums are best spent at home.  They point to the risks, saying that the danger is too high.

In a world of accountants and lawyers, where we have become risk adverse, frightened of ourselves, pulled by the extremes of dogma, confined by an almost universal lack of vision, we have turned away from the stars.  We look downward, inward. We have squandered our tomorrow, for the sybaritic indulgences of today. 

Not everyone moved from the Old World to the New World.  Only a few individuals made the trek out of Africa all those countless centuries and generations ago.  My own ancestors moved from Belarus and Romania at the turn of the last century, no doubt leaving behind sisters, brothers and cousins.  Not everyone is going to the stars. I won’t and unfortunately, neither will you.  Civilization is not about today, it is about tomorrow.

Why build anything at all, if we aren’t in this for the future?  If we stay here only, then our future is finite.  We will last until our resources run out, and then we will be prisoners here, as our star swells, eventually consuming us.  Or, we go out into the night, we learn and grow as we find ourselves on new worlds, eventually around new stars, we evolve. 

Do we dare to dream new dreams, to do the big things, not because they are easy or popular, but because they are our destiny?  Will we stop looking downward, counting the cracks in the pavement of our civilization, compiling the trivia into encyclopedic volumes, or start looking up…looking out into the night once more.

Streamlined and Modern

from the movie "Things to Come" 1936

Standing tough under stars and stripes
We can tell
This dream's in sight
You've got to admit it
At this point in time that it's clear
The future looks bright
On that train all graphite and glitter
Undersea by rail
Ninety minutes from New York to Paris
Well by seventy-six we'll be A.O.K.

What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free

Get your ticket to that wheel in space
While there's time
The fix is in
You'll be a witness to that game of chance in the sky
You know we've got to win
Here at home we'll play in the city
Powered by the sun
Perfect weather for a streamlined world
There'll be spandex jackets one for everyone

What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free

On that train all graphite and glitter
Undersea by rail
Ninety minutes from New York to Paris
(More leisure time for artists everywhere)
A just machine to make big decisions
Programmed by fellows with compassion and vision
We'll be clean when their work is done
We'll be eternally free yes and eternally young

What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free

“I.G.Y.” Donald Fagen, the Nightfly




First let me apologize for the delay in posting, but life is what happens between blog updates.

Imagine if you will a world that works.  A world where everything you need is a click away on your smart phone.  Medical care is affordable, efficient, and available.  Transportation is traffic free, and we move about our cities as efficiently as we move about our homes.  Information is accessible anywhere at any time, and it is sorted in a way we can see, hear and understand on an intuitive level.

Our civilization would be managed by expert systems, computers like the IBM Watson system, only vastly more powerful.  This is not say that humans would be unnecessary, but automation and networking go together; the movement of resources, the transmission of energy, the flow of things, are all susceptible to automation. Things would work, there would be no “systems integration issues” (“This damn thing isn’t working, why sweet lord Jesu, why!!!”)

Things would be clean, well managed, and orderly.  Everywhere.  If you touch down in Addis Ababa, your phone will work, you have access to everything that you would have at home, and be able to speak to the cab driver in his language, thanks to on-the-fly translation from your smart phone.  This is not to say that we won’t have drama.

People are people, no matter how smoothly things run.  Grandmas and puppies will still die, and the general human capacity to behave in the absolute worst possible way as often as permissible, would still be in effect.  But what if we reduce the opportunity for humans to behave badly?

What if our world ran so smoothly, that we had what we needed, when we needed it?  We would have more than enough, for billions, not just those that live in a geographic region or particular nation state.  We could have plenty not for those who look like us, or subscribe to our particular religious convictions or any religious convictions for that matter.  Our civilization would be truly civilized, global in scope, moving smoothly across the Earth’s surface.  In a world where there is no scarcity, would there be conflicts?

If we make a world, where we harness energy from the sun, the sea, the wind and the Earth itself, what would be our limitation?  When we can manufacture what we need from raw materials in our homes, make what we want, when we want it, at little or no cost, what are we fighting over?  Do we still have politics? Do we still have jingoistic nationalism and religious fundamentalism?  If your needs are met, you live in comfort, and things work, what do you have to complain about?  

from the movie "Things to Come" 1936